A Bull Market Sees the Worst in Speculators

In Washington, financial speculators have fat targets on their backs.

They are being blamed for high gas prices, soaring grocery bills and volatile commodity markets, and lawmakers are lashing out at market regulators for not cracking down on them more vigorously.

“You study it, but you don’t act against this incredible increase in speculation,” Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, complained to a senior official of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission at a recent Senate hearing. “Unless the C.F.T.C. is going to act against speculation, we don’t have a cop on the beat.”

Just this week, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, said he was working on a proposal to ban large institutional investors from the commodity markets entirely. The same day, the Bush administration endorsed another Senate proposal to create a new federal interagency task force to investigate commodity speculation. At least four public hearings have explored the topic in just the last two months, and Senator Lieberman will hold another session on June 24.

Although it is common in tough financial times to blame the speculators, this escalating hostility toward them is starting to worry people with years of knowledge about how commodity markets work. Because without speculators, they say, these markets do not work at all.

Speculators, people willing to risk their capital in search of high profits, are central to healthy commodity markets, they say, and broad-brush restrictions on them could damage markets that are already under pressure from rising global demand for food and fuel.

Even in Washington, there is widespread agreement that no single factor is responsible for rising food and energy prices. The hungry, high-growth economies of India and China are fundamentally affecting worldwide demand, while uncooperative weather and government policies on trade and ethanol are among the many factors affecting supply.

Commodities, priced in American dollars, tend to rise in price as the dollar weakens, making commodities a popular haven for investors fearful of inflation.

But beneath all these external factors is the simple seesaw of the marketplace: For every person who buys oil at $130 a barrel, there must be another person willing to sell at that price — and, odds are, at least one of them will be a speculator.

Before it was a Beltway epithet, “speculator” was simply a type of trader in the commodity futures markets. Unlike hedgers — the farmers, miners, refineries and other commercial interests that actually make or use the commodities themselves — the speculators, like day traders in the stock market, are simply trying to profit from changing prices.

Some speculators follow market trends, buying as prices rise and driving them higher. But others buy when they think prices have fallen too low, sell when they see prices as too high or place bets that pay off only when prices fall.

The more money that speculators are willing to put to work in the market, the more liquid it is and the easier it is to buy and sell without causing big ripples in prices.

Any trader, speculator or hedger can try to manipulate markets, of course. But with tempers rising along with food and fuel prices, some market scholars are concerned that speculation, the legal pursuit of market profits, is becoming a synonym for manipulation — secret and collusive trading activity aimed at deliberately moving prices to produce illegal profits.

As political pressure has grown, regulators have stepped up their demands for more detailed trading information from commodity exchanges, to improve their ability to monitor trading.

In a statement this week, Walter Lukken, the C.F.T.C. chairman, said the commission was determined to see that commodity prices were set “by the fundamental forces of supply and demand, rather than by abusive or manipulative practices.”

The commodity market has seen its share of manipulation scandals — allegations that executives at J. R. Simplot had tried to fix the Maine potato market in 1976, allegations that the Hunt family of Texas had manipulated the silver market in 1979 and, just last year, BP’s settlement of federal charges that it had manipulated propane prices.

Certainly, there have been unusual price spikes in commodity markets, like the short, sharp roller-coaster ride that hit the cotton market in early March and the more recent gyrations in the oil markets that have alarmed some market participants.

CONTINUED : Speculators crucial to keeping markets liquid

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